Young Cubans Haunted By Memories Of Homeland

January 02, 1989|By Jorge Casuso.

Twenty-seven years after boarding a Florida-bound boat one stormy summer night, what Paul Sierra remembers best about his native Cuba are ``the light, the doors, playing with toys in the corner of the rooms.``

Sierra, 44, has spent most of his life in Chicago exorcising these childhood memories on colorful canvases. The vivid tropical scenes are drenched with water, which flows through the houses and washes everything away.

``The revolution has created in my mind the feeling that nothing is forever,`` said Sierra, who left Cuba with his parents when he was 16 years old. ``The whole world can crumble on you in a very short period of time.``

Like Sierra, many of Chicago`s 17,000 Cubans were teenagers or children asleep that early New Year`s morning in 1959 when Fidel Castro rose to power and, without their knowing it, altered the course of their lives.

Thirty years later, they live in Chicago pursuing successful careers that often have been shaped, like Sierra`s, by their early experiences. They speak English with little or no accent and move comfortably in what was once a foreign world.

But they are often haunted by a past they have spent years piecing together with distant memories and puzzled by a country they have seen mostly through their parents` eyes.

``Anytime I find somebody who has gone to Cuba, I ask them about it,``

said Sierra, who refuses to visit the island. ``I often wonder if the Cubans down there are the Cubans I remember.``

A few Cuban-Americans, overcome by curiosity, have risked being labeled

``communist sympathizers`` and have returned.

``I wanted to see if the things I thought Cuba was were really true,``

said Juan Montenegro, 39, who has returned to the island twice.

Like many younger Cubans, Montenegro, who left Cuba with his parents in 1960, grew up in an anti-Castro household. As a boy, he attended meetings in the living room of his Chicago home, where his father and his friends plotted to overthrow Castro`s communist regime.

``I was very conservative,`` Montenegro said. ``I was a chip off the old block.``

But like many younger Cubans, Montenegro began questioning his conservative politics when he entered college in the late 1960s.

``Learning more about the rest of the world made the Cuban problem a lot less of a problem,`` said Montenegro, who attended Loyola University. ``I started seeing that there were a lot of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago and I started asking, `Why are they here?` ``

For Montenegro, who began moonlighting as a disc jockey in 1971, the question led to a love affair with Puerto Rican music, which he

surreptitiously played in the early morning hours of an all-night Cuban radio show. The response from younger Hispanics was overwhelming, and Montenegro started his own English-language program.

The more Montenegro played salsa, the more he recognized the Cuban rhythms in the music. ``I started to realize that they were playing Cuban music,`` he said.

His interest piqued, Montenegro began picking up Cuban broadcasts on shortwave radio and reading history books about the island. When charter flights to Cuba were resumed in 1979, he joined the 100,000 exiled-Cubans who visited their homeland.

``It was very emotional when I saw the beaches, and the deep fields and the palms,`` said Montenegro, who returned to Cuba this summer. ``What really hit me was the proximity. It`s 30 minutes by air. But you see maps, and a lot of them don`t even include the island.``

For Margarita Garcia, who came to the U.S. when she was 15 years old, the country she left in 1961 no longer exists. Garcia`s childhood home, which she can describe in detail, is now a museum. Even the Cuban landscape has changed. ``The tobacco fields are now potato patches,`` said Garcia, 43, who runs an advertising agency in Chicago. ``The park I remember is now a parking lot. The Cuba I knew, the Cubans I knew, don`t exist. I see broadcasts of Cuba, and it`s like seeing Zaire or Iceland.``

Like other Cubans of her generation, for years Garcia made it a point to maintain her culture for an eventual return to the island. In 1967, she helped found ``Los Jovenes Cubanos,`` a circle of young Chicago-area Cubans who met in libraries and church basements and launched a radio show.

``We were preparing to topple Castro and help develop Cuba,`` Garcia recalled. ``There wasn`t the least doubt Fidel would fall. It was only a matter of time.``

The radio show launched by the group led several members, like Garcia, to pursue broadcasting and advertising careers, which put them in contact with other Hispanics.

``My involvement with the Hispanic community came through selling ads for the radio show,`` said Garcia, one of the partners in Hernandez and Garcia Ltd., an advertising agency that caters to the city`s large Hispanic market.